# Post-Processing Pipeline

**Track:** Advanced 3D — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** three.js
**Level:** Medium
**Prerequisites:** 3D Coordinate Space & Meshes, Lighting & Materials in 3D

**In one line:** EffectComposer: bloom, depth of field, custom full-screen passes.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Post-processing treats the rendered frame as raw material: the scene is drawn to an offscreen texture, then refined by full-screen fragment passes chained through three.js's EffectComposer. Bloom isolates the brightest regions, blurs them, and adds the result back, simulating the glow of light bleeding in a lens or sensor. Depth of field reads the depth buffer to compute a circle of confusion, blurring by distance to mimic a camera's aperture and focal plane. Custom passes—color grading, chromatic aberration, vignettes—complete the grammar. The aesthetic is photographic and cinematic: the conventions that signal "camera" in film, applied to synthetic images to make light feel physical.